


Thirteen Turns Of The Wheel

by Leyenn



Category: Babylon 5
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-04
Updated: 2010-01-04
Packaged: 2017-10-05 19:30:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/45298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leyenn/pseuds/Leyenn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Persistence pays, although usually at a price you're not ready for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thirteen Turns Of The Wheel

She worries about him: it isn't her place but she worries all the same. She's not the one who has that right, now, if she ever was. She fools herself that she doesn't know him any better than his wife, or his parents, or the sister he grew up with. And she pretends that knowing and trusting aren't the same as love.

She's thinking about him when she looks round at her tac display and sees two furies barely caught by the interceptors in time. She's thinking about him when she stands in the darkness in the middle of the night and watches the stars move outside, and one of them is Z'Ha'Dum. She thinks of him every sleepless night until he comes back, and then every aching night after he tells her the news.

She worries about him all the time, whether he's there or not. (Mostly when he's not.) She hates it whenever he leaves her behind, and in her dreams she screams herself hoarse at being told she's leaving him instead.

Her last thoughts are of him.

Her first are a shattered plea that goes unheard in his absence.

He feels worn the first time he holds her again, even though he smiles and his arms are warm; there's no innocence there any more. Part of her wants to stay when he hugs her goodbye, but she can't. It hurts, and she's afraid.

She worries about him still, though, what he's doing, how much he's trying to squeeze into half the lifetime he should have had. She follows ISN until they lose the signal out on the Rim, when she has to grit her teeth and employ less... above board methods. Dealing with the Rangers still brings a sting of regret - but it's only a sting, and she clings to that in the night when she's alone and aching with the pressure of life on her shoulders. Better to think she's lost her last chance than willingly given it away.

They meet up eight, nine, twelve times - a conference here, a diplomatic tour there. Years go past while she's waiting for the next chance. He wants to see her more, and she wants to visit, so she smiles excuses he knows all too well and doesn't.

She's almost forgotten how she feels when she hears the news that starts it all over again.

Unlucky thirteen, she thinks at the funeral ceremony, standing just behind him, being the one who takes David by the shoulder and holds him back when they open the Starfire Wheel for only the second time in centuries. (Another person in her life gone.) David, not the smiling toddler she remembers, turns his face away and sobs into her chest. She holds him tight, exactly the way she holds his father after the suns go down.

Earthforce accepts her resignation by Stellarcom. A 'special circumstance', they say. She crumples the official note without reading it and puts it in a drawer.

Days come and go. They turn into weeks, months, birthdays and vacations. She worries about him every second: she can't stop. It isn't her place, it will never be her place, but she can't help it. He's broken in places she doesn't know how to fix any more.

So she watches him, and worries about him. Someone has to.

It's crazy that until the night she ends up in his arms, on his couch - in his bed; against his body; in his soul - she doesn't realise that he's always worried about her, too.

_That's_ when she stops worrying* - because she has better things to do with her concentration, and because it's hard to think she has no right to when he looks at her like that.

*(All right, it's not. She never actually stops, not really. Given the trouble he can get into, that would be the height of stupidity... but she doesn't tell him that.)

  


*

  



End file.
